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“Your romantic advice has structural defects.”

“She stopped walking to a bench.” Pike spread his hands. “She’s already in it. You haven’t caught up yet.”

Tor, sitting on the couch, had been silently listening and waiting for the conversation to become truly important. He then set his glass down.

“She stayed.”

All eyes were on him.

“The cliff. The training. The walk.” He didn’t look up. “She could have left, but she didn’t.” He picked up his glass again. “That’s what you need to know.”

Pike looked at Drayce, biting back an I-told-you-so and letting the silence say it for him instead.

Maelin turned his glass. “The amplification works both ways.” He’d had this thought before tonight—Drayce could see it in his tone, no sense of arrival. “Her surges hit you differently since the bond was announced. You sense the spike before it happens. Your stability keeps her grounded in the field.”

“That’s been true from the start.”

“It’s more accurate now.”

For two weeks, he’d sensed her surges from afar—an awareness lingering at the back of his mind that was neither a sound nor a sensation, yet both. He’d dismissed it as mere proximity awareness and avoided examining it further, knowing it would lead him here. And now, he was here regardless.

“If someone is deliberately provoking her surges,” Pike picked up the thread from earlier — he’d clearly been running this alongside the whole conversation — “then they’re also hitting you. Every provoked surge lands twice. Once on the ward line. Once on you.”

“That’s the mechanism,” Drayce agreed. “Two points of destabilization for one action.”

Tor said one word: “Efficient.” It carried a bleak edge, as close as he came to editorial opinion.

“Which means someone knows about the bond.” Maelin looked at the table.

The room went quiet.

Drayce set his glass down. “Or suspects it. The founding-line pairing is documented in the historical records. Anyone with access to the Elder Council archives⁠—”

“Colleen.” Pike. Flat. Not a question.

“We don’t have enough to move on that yet.”

“I know. I’m noting it.”

He wrote it in the notebook. Drayce didn't look at what he’d written. He already knew what it said.

“The bond,” Drayce set his glass down. “I won’t be using it. She doesn’t know about it, and she won’t until she’s truly ready to hear. Even then, it’s not something to be used as leverage. Every decision she makes is entirely hers.”

He addressed the room because they needed to hear it aloud, as they were the ones who would hold him accountable. That’s why he trusted them with the rest.

Pike gazed at him with the calm confidence he seldom displayed in the field but always carried in private. “We know, Drayce.”

“I need it in the record.”

“Then it’s in the record.” Pike tapped the notebook. “Verbatim.”

Tor, sitting on the couch, said, “That’s the right call.” Four words delivered flatly. For Tor, this was a statement. It also subtly hinted, “I’ve seen you bear grief as if it’s your job for thirty years, and I’m relieved you’re here instead of still carrying it.”

Drayce heard it all. He looked at the fire and said nothing, because nothing was the appropriate response, and Tor knew that when he said it.

Maelin refilled the glasses without making a fuss. He settled back, and the four of them sat quietly by the fire, a silent way of dealing with things that didn’t need words.

Outside, the wind had decided the weather and was moving on. The offshore ward line pulsed once, low and distant, the hum Drayce had been monitoring for weeks. It was holding for now.